Maid to Order: Commercial Fetishism and Gender Power

Maid to Order COMMERCIALFETISHISM AND GENDERPOWER In Sex, Madonna has her wits, if not her clothes, about her. The scandal Anne McClintock of Sex is the scandal of S/M: the provocative confession that the edicts of power are reversible. So the critics bay for her blood: a woman who takes sex and money into her own hands must-sooner or later-bare her breast to the knife. But with the utmost artifice and levity, Madonna refuses to imitate tragedy. Taking sex into the street, and money into the bedroom, she flagrantly violates the sacramental edicts of private and public, and stages sexual commerce as a theater of transformation. Madonna's erotic photo album is filled with the theatrical paraphernalia of S/M: boots, chains, leather, whips, masks, costumes, and scripts. Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, warns ominously that it thus runs the risk of unleashing "the dark side" of human nature, "with par- ticular danger for women."1 But the outrage of Sex is its insight into consensual S/M as high theater.2 Demonizing S/M confuses the distinction between unbridled sadism and the social subculture of consensual fetishism.3 To argue that in consensual S/M the "dominant" has power, and the slave has not, is to read theater for reality; it is to play the world forward. The economy of S/M is the economy of conversion: slave to master, adult to baby, pain to pleasure, man to woman, and back again. S/M, as Foucault puts it, "is not a name given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, and which constitutes one of the greatest conver- sions of Western imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of the heart."4 Consensual S/M "plays the world backwards."5 In Sex, as in S/M, roles are swiftly swapped. At the Vault, New York's amiable S/M dungeon, the domina Madonna archly flicks her whip across the glistening leather hips of a female "slave." The domina's breasts are bare; the slave is armored. Contrary to popular stigma, S/M theatrically flouts the edict that manhood is synonymous with mastery, and submis- sion a female fate. Further into the album, a man genuflects at Madonna's feet, neck bound in a collar, the lash at his back. But the domina's foot is also bound, and the leash straps her hand to his neck. The bondage fetish performs identity and power as twined in interdependence, and rebuts the Enlightenment vision of the solitary and self-generating individual. The lesbian with the knife is also the lover; scenes of bondage are stapled to scenes of abandon, and Sex makes no pretense at romantic profundity but flaunts S/M as a theater of scene and surface. i :::- :::- ::::-: :iiiii ::-i:: i:- i ? ? i:- i:-i Photographs by Grace Lau, 1993 Hence the paradox of consensual S/M. On the one hand, it seems to parade a servile obedience to conventions of power. In its clich&drever- ence for formal ritual, it is the most ceremonial and decorous of practices. S/M is "beautifully suited to symbolism."6 As theater, S/M borrows its decor, props, and costumery (bonds, chains, ropes, blindfolds) and its scenes (bedrooms, kitchens, dungeons, convents, prisons, empires) from the everyday cultures of power. At first glance, then, S/M seems a servant to orthodox power. Yet, on the contrary, with its exaggerated emphasis on costume and scene, S/M performs social power as scripted, and hence as permanently subject to change. As a theater of conversion, S/M reverses and transmutes the social meanings it borrows, without finally stepping outside the enchantment of its magic circle. In S/M, paradox is paraded, not resolved. This essay is pitched at the borders of contradiction. Against Nature: S/M and Sexology In 1885, the sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the terms sadism and masochism,and medicalized both as individual psychopathologies of the flesh.7 Sadism, for Krafft-Ebing, was an aberrant and atavistic manifestation of the "innate desire to humiliate, hurt, wound, or even destroy others in order thereby to create sexual pleasure in one's self."8 Nature was the overlord of power, but had, in its wisdom, seen fit to ordain the aggressive impulse in men, not women. "Under normal circumstances man meets obstacles which it is his part to overcome, and for which nature has given him an aggressive character."9"Normal" sexuality thus merely enacts the male's "natural" sexual aggression and the female's "natural" sexual passivity: "In the intercourse of the sexes, the active or aggressive role belongs to man; woman remains passive, defensive. It affords man great pleasure to win a woman, to conquer her."10 Yet women, for Krafft-Ebing, are indirectly to blame for male sadism, for their very shyness provokes male aggression: "It seems probable that this sadistic force is developed by the natural shyness and modesty of women towards the aggressive manners of the male."1 Happily, however, Nature designed woman to take a refined pleasure in man's rough victory: "Woman no doubt derives pleasure from her innate coyness and the final victory of man affords her intense gratification."'2 The task for medical sexology was to police a double boundary: between the "normal" culture of male aggression and the "abnormal" culture of S/M, and between "normal" female masochism and "abnormal" male masochism. The first contradiction-between "natural"hetero- sexuality and the "unnatural perversions"-was primarily managed by projecting the "perversions" onto the invented zone of race. Sexologists Maid to Order 89 Since S/M is the like Krafft-Ebing demonized S/M as the psychopathology of the atavistic individual, as a blood-flaw and stigma of the flesh. S/M, like other theatrical exercise fetishisms, was figured as a regression backward in time to the "prehis- tory" of racial "degeneration," existing ominously in the heart of the of social contra- imperial metropolis-the degeneration of the race writ as an individual pathology of the soul. diction, it is self- Thus, for Krafft-Ebing, decent doses of male aggression are a fait accompli of nature. Genuine sadism, however, exists in "civilized man" consciously only to a "weak and rather rudimentary degree."13While sadism is a natural trait of atavistic traces of sadism in "civilized against nature, "primitive" peoples, man" stem, not from environment or social accident, but are awakened not in the sense from a primordial past: "Sadism must ... be counted among the primitive anomalies of the sexual life. It is a disturbance (a deviation) in the that it violates evolution of psychosexual processes sprouting from the soil of psychical degeneration."14 natural law, but Like Krafft-Ebing, Freud agrees that the aggressive impulse is "read- ily demonstrable in the normal individual."15Again, the "normal individ- in the sense that ual" is male: "The sexuality of most men shows an admixture of aggres- of a desire to subdue."16 But for the difference between it denies the exis- sion, Freud, aggression and sadism is one of degree, not of kind: "Sadism would then tence of natural correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and has been brought to the law in the first foreground by displacement."17 Masochism, however, presents a more subtle riddle. For Krafft-Ebing, since masochism is simply Nature's way place. of saying that women are destined for a passive role in society, masochism is natural to women, but not to men. Freud, however, sees the "most striking peculiarity" of sadomasochism as the fact that "its active and passive forms are regularly encountered together in the same per- son."18 Male masochism, moreover, is by no means an uncommon phenomenon. Freud, however, manages this contradiction by identifying male masochism as, more properly speaking, "feminine."19The hetero- sexual distribution of "male" aggression and "female" passivity is sus- tained, if precariously. By contrast with unbridled sadism, however, consensual and commercial S/M is less a biological flaw or pathological variant of "natural" male aggression and "natural"female passivity, than it is a historical subculture that emerged in Europe alongside the imperial Enlightenment. Far from being a primordial manifestation of racial "degeneracy," S/M is a subculture organized primarily around the symbolic exercise of social risk. Indeed, the outrage of S/M is precisely its hostility to the idea of nature as the custodian of social power: S/M refuses to read power as fate or destiny. Since S/M is the theatrical exercise of social contradiction, it is 90 Anne McClintock self-consciously against nature, not in the sense that it violates natural law, but in the sense that it denies the existence of natural law in the first place. S/M performssocial power as both contingent and constitutive, as sanctioned neither by fate nor by God, but by social convention and invention, and thus as open to historical change. Consensual S/M insists on exhibiting the "primitive" (slave, baby, woman) as a characterin the historical time of modernity. S/M stages the "primitive irrational"as a dramatic script, a communal performance in the heart of Western reason. The paraphernaliaof S/M (boots, whips, chains, uniforms) are the paraphernalia of state power, public punishment con- verted to private pleasure. S/M plays social power backward,visibly staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy, and the alienation of the body as being at the center of Western reason, thus revealing the imperial logic of individualism, but also irreverentlyrefusing it as fate.

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